social justice

I’m sure you or someone you know has seen or posted Michael Luciano’s Atheists Don’t Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing piece on The Daily Banter. It’s a short piece using the conference I attended this weekend, Moving Social Justice, to claim that expecting atheists to care about such outlandish things as equality diversity is “silly” because the dictionary definition of an atheist is someone who believes in no god(s). Also implicit in the title is the idea that those of us who care deeply about social justice are not “atheists” even though many of us say we are.

Well, okay, then. Michael Luciano thinks that I’m not atheist since this is “my social justice agenda”, not that of atheists. If that’s true, then atheists like Michael Luciano have no right to bring up Cosmos (i.e. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan), Christian right-wing sexism, the normalization of atheism, religious sex scandals, and Islam’s perceived flaws in their promotion of their purely-atheist agenda. Continue reading “Top Five Arguments the Atheist Agenda Doesn’t Have the Right to Use”→

As I wrote last week, people who do not identify as allies cause undue and often unintentional distress in marginalized groups. Some of them might be indifferent, some might not. Either way, in their case, it’s a simple lack of awareness. Presumably, one would expect more from fellow activists or self-identified allies, right?

Wait, do I hear a mass eye-rolling from Internet-land?

Indeed, if you know anything about the matter and/or have engaged in enough social justice-related activism or even just dialogue, you know that half-baked “allies” are often worse than the simply ignorant. Continue reading “How to Fail at Being an Ally”→